Tag Archives: Design

You know that chair in the bedroom you just toss your clothes on, only to finally take them off twice a month and toss them in the laundry hamper? Yeah, well, it’s not doing its purpose of letting you sit now, is it? So why bother? The Sacrificial Chair elegantly acknowledges this common habit and is made for the sole purpose of tossing garments haphazardly on. It’s a simple metal wireframe, easily assembled after being shipped flat, and serves absolutely zero sitting duty. We imagine the philosophy is that if you can’t change your bad habits, you may as well embrace them. You will, of course, have to pay $140 for the privilege.

This is neat. It’s a chair. You sit on it. It looks like it’s about to fly off, but, surprise surprise, it won’t. Chairs don’t fly, guys. This one is made by Mousarris, and like any neat looking piece of furniture, will put a gigantic hole in your bank account. You’ll have to part with €12000 (around $13,000USD) to give your guests the impression that you’re really into the whole Aladdin vibe. And in case it weighs in your decision to buy or not, you should know the piece is made in collaboration with artist Jan Blythe.

It’s everyone’s dirty little secret: “Just don’t look under my desk.” We make efforts to keep a tidy apartment, but most of us simply balk at the idea of trying to make anything beautiful with the spaghetti strands that wiggle around the back of our desktop computers, so we just ignore that area. The Pocketo Cable Organizer tries to make the task marginally easier by providing you with a plastic pin-filled board to wrap your cables around. An adhesive back allows you to stick it to a wall, or under your work surface, and then it’s just a matter of routing your cables between the pins in any pattern that makes most sense to you. Best of all, it’s super cheat at $12 for a pack of 2.

You can add all kinds of useful features to a bicycle, and it’ll be just that: a useful bike. But you can take another route and simply add aesthetic features whose only use is to make the bike look beautiful. In this regard, we’d say Ono Bikes, from Serbia, has succeeded. Its first model, the Archont, is certainly a looker. 9 feet long, and weighing in at a hefty 20kg (44lbs), this stainless steel easy rider features Shimano components and Schwalbe 26″ and 28″ wheels. The electric version is even more interesting, topping out at 49mph (80kph) on a 60 mile range. We don’t know how much they’ll set you back, but we imagine it’s one of those “if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it” kind of items.

One of the many indignities suffered by those having to live in cramped downtown apartments is the lack of sunlight. Granted it’s a tradeoff from having to mow the lawn and clean out the gutters, but that’s still no reason to dream about being able to eat your cake and have it too. Argentinian architect Aldana Ferrer Garcia thought of a solution and invented the MoreSky Windows. They look just like normal windows but have a hinged telescoping mechanism that lets you lean back on them and stare at the sky. It also looks like you might fall to your death, so we suppose you can consider this a thrill-seeking adventure type product as well as a cool new way to get more daylight.

Unfortunately, it looks like this is just a concept from Mr. Garcia, and isn’t a product you can buy.

Most water bottles are sold to sports enthusiasts who like to stay hydrated during their workouts. Or to regular people who simply want to have some H2O handy. But the Aquabook is a little different. Shaped a little bit like a book, flat and rectangular and the size on an A5 sheet, it is meant to fit perfectly in a backpack or carrying case already full of books and papers. Cylindrical bottles will obviously take up a whole bunch of room and leave empty, inefficient spaces in your bag. The Aquabook carries 25 ounces of water, is made of BPA-free plastic, comes in 5 colors, and ships with cleaning tabs and brushes to ward off bacteria. It’s a €20 ($22USD) pledge to get your own, and you’ll have to wait until February 2016 to get yours.

For the same amount of money you’ll spend on Bang & Olufsen’s new Beolab 90, you could buy 4 average new cars. Or put a sizeable down payment on a luxurious home. But if you already have the cars, and the home, and more money in your account than most people make in a lifetime, these speakers sure look like the bee’s knees. Aside from their fantastic design, the BeoLab 90 packs a host of fascinating features that would be sure to liven up the mega parties you’re probably already throwing in your fancy mansion.

The most interesting of these is what the company calls Beam Width Control, which allows you to precisely direct the sound to any place in your room; if you want to fill it up entirely, pick the 360 degree setting and sit back as the speakers blast away from their 8,200 Watt powerhouse (produced by 14 ICEpower and four class D amplifiers), or have them point at the living room only, for instance. Microphones on the set pick up the sound reflected off your walls, and with active Room Compensation adjust the settings so you automatically get the best sound possible. The whole thing can be controlled with the included remote or with a companion app on your smartphone, which gives you the ability to save presets and set the ambiance at the touch of a button.

You know how you can get someone to spend way too much money on a simple set of coasters? Design them so that they when you stack them up, they look like a cactus, then charge your customers $43. Yup, $43 for a set of 6 coasters. That’s the idea that designer Cliver Roddy had, and to at least try to justify the price, the set is made from a terracotta pot, birch plywood, and mint green high quality engineered wood. Each coaster is of a slightly different size to give the “cactus” a more organic look, but they’ll still do their job.

Dice have looked just about the same for a very long time. But that’s no reason to keep it that way. Kacha, an architect, decided to redesign the iconic gaming prop into the Ako Dice, pictured above. The number of each face is represented by a line, giving the piece a Tron-like feel and a techno-futuristic aesthetic. He brought his idea to Kickstarter, where he successfully convinced 6,545 backers to part with their money. They might be getting their Ako dice soon, but if you want your you’ll have to sign up on his website and wait for his store to go online. We’re not sure what the price is, but the anodized aluminum dice could sure take their place in our next Monopoly marathon.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.